For a split second that stretched into an eternity, Steve was dangling helplessly in space. Then Thor tossed Dodger to Natasha and grabbed the railing of the balcony below, while Loki and Downey, on the second storey down, caught the other end of the line of sheets. Steve stopped with a jerks that felt like it would pull his shoulders out of their sockets, and then he was just dangling there, a hundred feet above the ground.
Don't look down, he told himself. Heights didn't usually bother Steve – but then, he could usually count on surviving his encounter with the ground. If he fell now, his odds were not that good.
He looked anyway, and wished he hadn't. Beneath his feet he could see the orange glow of the sodium vapor street lamps, and the lights on a train pulling into the station, all of it impossibly tiny and far away. The sight made him feel ill. There'd been a time, back when he was a sick little kid in Brooklyn, when Steve Rogers would have given anything to be normal. Now, however, normal simply wasn't good enough.
Thor let himself down onto the second balcony, and helped the others pull Steve up. Steve somersaulted awkwardly onto the rail and spilled onto the concrete in a boneless heap, his head still spinning from the height. It took him a moment to catch his breath.
"You okay?" Natasha helped him to his feet.
"Stop asking me that," said Steve, a little more harshly than he meant to. He was not okay, and he hated that it was so obvious. "I'm fine." He wobbled on his feet, then got his balance and banged on the glass doors.
"Peggy!" he shouted, then caught himself and cursed under his breath. "I mean, Hayley! Are you in there?" What if this were the wrong room?
The exterior light came on, the curtains rolled back, and Hayley opened the balcony doors. She was dressed in a navy blue camisole and a pair of pajama pants with a tropical flower pattern on them, and squinting in the sudden illumination. She had no makeup on and her hair was a mess, and she was the most beautiful thing Steve had ever seen. Peggy would never have let him see her like that…
"Chris?" she asked. "I mean… I don't know what I mean. Now what? Did you… did you climb down the building?"
Steve pointed up. "Chi'Tauri," he said. "In our hotel room."
Hayley frowned. "Those people from the convention?"
"Yes!" he said. "But they're the real thing. Like Stan Lee said, they're looking for Loki. They found his three fans and made them tell where he was. We have to get out of the building."
"Can I get dressed?" Hayley asked.
There was a creak of distressed metal above them. Thor leaned over the edge to look up.
"They are trying to climb down after us," he said.
"No time to dress," Steve told Hayley.
He limped after as everybody else hurried out into the hallway. Hayley hit the elevator button, and luckily there was already a car on their floor. The doors slid open, and they piled inside. Steve was not wearing a watch and had no reference for how long this was all taking, but it felt painfully slow. The doors slid shut, and the machinery rumbled as they began to descend.
Steve probably should have felt relieved, but he was mostly just annoyed and tired. His head hurt from being awakened in the middle of the night, Dodger's barking only made it worse, and his ankle was on fire from being walked on just as it had started trying to heal. All he really wanted to do was curl up right there on the floor of the elevator and sleep for a week, but a moment later he was shocked back to full wakefulness, as something heavy landed on top of the elevator car.
Everybody looked up. Hayley grabbed Thor's arm.
Steve internally cursed the situation all over again. He knew he couldn't fight the Chi'Tauri – he was exhausted and his ankle was throbbing and the hulking extraterrestrials would just tear him limb from limb and then go after the others. He was about to hammer on the elevator buttons, as if that would help them reach the ground faster, but then he noticed the red emergency stopped. Steve pressed that, instead, and the elevator halted with a thunk.
"What are you doing?" Loki demanded.
Something rattled in the ceiling, and there was a loud bang as an access hatch opened. Hayley let out a short, sharp cry of alarm, then clapped both hands over her own mouth as a huge, muscular, six-fingered hand reached in and groped around. Everybody ducked, and Steve caught sight of glowing eyes in the darkness above the hatch – but the Chi'Tauri was far too big to get through. That would buy them some time.
Natasha was already pressing the door open button, but it wasn't working. Steve forced his fingers into the gap between the elevator doors.
"Somebody help me!" he ordered.
Thor joined him, and so did Downey – Hayley and Natasha would have done the same, but there wasn't enough room. The men wrenched the inner doors open, and found the outer one. The car had stopped between floors, and the top of the door was at knee-height. Thor and Steve got down on the floor, and the two of them managed to open the outer door just far enough for Nat to wiggle through. Steve heard her land on the carpet outside.
"You!" she shouted.
"Me?" asked a startled male voice.
"You're the only one here," said Nat. "Help me with this door!"
A teenage bellboy with dark curly hair joined her in forcing the outer door open.
"Are you Scarlett Johansson?" he asked through his teeth as they struggled with it.
"People ask me that all the time!" said Nat.
They dragged Hayley through second, then Downey, since they were smaller. The doors had to open a little wider in order to admit Steve, Thor, and Loki. Loki, as the thinnest of the remaining three, crawled out first. Steve went second, and then he heard an explosion.
He was still in the process of turning around to help Thor when the elevator car lurched downward, smoke and sparks billowing out. The Chi'Tauri's hands, fishbelly-white with four fingers and two thumbs on each, grabbed the doors and shoved them open the rest of the way. Machinery wailed in protest.
Up and down the hallway, hotel guests awakened by the noise were opening the doors of their rooms to find out what was going on. Most of them shut them again immediately.
"Coming through!" shouted Natasha.
Steve, Downey, and Loki got out of the way as Nat, Hayley, and the bellboy charged at the elevator doors, pushing a luggage cart laden with somebody's impressive collection of Louis Vuitton bags. With three people behind it, the impact was enough to knock the startled Chi'Tauri backwards, and the elevator car it was standing in dropped another three or four feet. Ripping part of the roof off to get in had managed the cable and activated the emergency brake, but the combined load of Thor, the luggage, and the enormous alien was right at the elevator's weight limit.
Bags wouldn't keep a Chi'Tauri down for long, no matter how heavy they were. The group picked themselves up and fled. The bellboy dashed into a side hallway and slammed the door, while the rest of them found a stairwell and started down.
Except that Steve couldn't run. Putting weight on his injured ankle was only making it worse and worse. It was about to fall out from under him, and the only member of the group who might have been able to carry him in their current condition was Thor, who was still trapped in the elevator. Steve made it a few steps, then his leg simply folded up, and he tumbled down a dozen concrete steps to end in a dazed heap on the landing below.
Hayley and Loki helped him up, and let him lean on them as they kept going.
At the next floor down they were relieved to find Thor, climbing out of the elevator with the help of two laundry ladies. He was in bad shape, peppered with bruises and cuts from the debris of the explosion, coughing from a lungful of smoke, and with his hair singed. He was alive, though, and his worst injury was a wide, raw scrape across the back of his right shoulder, which was oozing blood in several places.
"You two," Nat said to the laundry ladies. "There must be another elevator for the staff. Where is it?"
The younger one, who was not much older than the teenage bellboy from the floor above, gestured for them to follow. "This way!" she said.
She showed them into a side hallway where the soda and ice machines were, and there they found a larger elevator with a housekeeping cart waiting outside it. The cart was empty, its trash bin and laundry bag having both been taken away, and it offered a solution to what was currently slowing them down. Without having to be told, Steve climbed into it. The others pushed him into the elevator and once again Steve hit the button for the ground floor.
"What's going…" the older laundry lady began to ask, but then there was a crash, and the sprinkler system went off.
"Get somewhere safe and lock the door!" Steve ordered them. The elevator doors slid shut behind them.
They were only after Loki, Steve reminded himself as they descended. The Chi'Tauri at the convention centre had left off defending themselves from three people they knew to be enemies because they'd realized they'd lost Loki, and fighting anyone else was a waste of their time. They wouldn't hurt the hotel employees, and had probably just left Wendy crying in the bathroom.
Probably.
Another explosion rattled the building.
After what seemed like an eternity, the elevator came to a stop on the ground floor. Steve could hear sirens outside, but they ignored those and took a back hallway to the parking garage, laundry cart and all. There was a short flight of stairs that they just let the cart bump painfully down, and Hayley threw herself at the emergency exit door at the bottom. An alarm began to blare.
"I don't have my keys!" Downey realized. "I can't get into the van!"
By the time he'd finished saying that, Natasha had already picked the lock on the vehicle's door, and she got it started while the others climbed in. They roared out of the underground parking, crashed right through the gate, and kept going.
"They've probably got a camera on that thing," Downey observed morosely. "I don't wanna go back to jail."
"Where are we going?" Hayley asked.
That was the moment when Steve really understood that she was still with them, and that she was probably going to be stuck with them for the foreseeable future. That was his fault. He'd just had to go into the Q&A panel, which had given Downey the chance to sneak off, which had led to them being in the hotel in time to meet her again, and now here they were. Hayley Atwell was not Peggy Carter. She hadn't signed up for this, she didn't have the skills or experience to deal with what might happen on this awful little adventure, and Steve's injury meant he was in no position to protect her if it all went wrong. Natasha may have ruined Scarlett Johansson's marriage, but Steve might yet get Hayley Atwell killed.
"I don't know," said Downey. "Where are we going, in my van, which we stole even though I'm now driving it, in our pajamas, in the middle of the night?"
"Back to Los Angeles," said Nat. "We have to find Donny. He can contact his friend Kevin at NASA, and they might be able to help us get back to our own universe."
"Okay. Do the aliens know that's where we're going?" was Downey's next question.
"They shouldn't," Nat assured him. "Not unless somebody mentioned it in front of those three fans."
"Then they don't," Steve said. "They left before we got to that. We didn't start talking about it until Bob was done in the washroom."
"Um…" Hayley swallowed. "Actually… I might have told them."
Several heads turned in her direction. "What?" asked Steve.
"Why?" asked Loki.
"They wanted to know if you'd be at the convention again tomorrow!" said Hayley. "I said no, because you were going to NASA so somebody there could send you back to Asgard! I just wanted them to go home," she added. "I didn't know!"
Loki glared at Thor. "Think what a pickle I'd be in if you lot hadn't showed up to rescue me," he said sourly.
"We'll have none of that," Thor told him. "Had we not come for you, you would at this very moment be in Thanos' hands."
"Don't you two even start!" said Natasha. "If I have to listen to you bickering all the way back to California I am throwing you both out the window!"
"I was not bickering, I was merely stating a fact," said Loki.
Steve was sitting in the wrong place to see what sort of look Natasha gave him, but Loki did stop talking, and that was what mattered.
"So are we still going to California?" asked Hayley. "Or is that plan off the table?"
"I think we have to try," said Steve. Nobody had any better ideas, but this one really didn't look very good. The Chi'Tauri would almost certainly be there ahead of them… and then what? Would they lie in wait for Loki, or simply tear the place apart when they found he wasn't there?
"I have definitely lost my mind," Downey remarked yet again. He programmed the destination into his GPS.
"I don't think there's more than four of them, at least," said Steve. They needed some good news, and that was the closest thing he could think of. "The one that first broke into the room was the same one Natasha smacked with the fire extinguisher. It had a bruise on its chest."
"So we know the number of our enemy," Thor said.
"And we might know something about how they got here," Natasha put in. "After the last time they fought on Earth you'd think they'd want to send as big a force as they could. If there's only four, maybe that's all they could send. That means they can't call for reinforcements."
"They hardly need them," groused Loki. "All we're doing is running away."
Thor opened his mouth to say something, but caught Natasha's eye and changed his mind.
Before setting out on the full twenty-four hour drive back to Los Angeles, they had to stop for supplies. At seven AM a Wal-Mart opened, and they were able to run in for coffee, breakfast, and more first aid supplies. It was Natasha and Hayley who did the actual running, since they were the closest to being properly dressed – Nat was still in the t-shirt and leggings she'd bought at the airport, while Hayley was obviously in her pajamas but made it a little more modest by pulling Downey's cardigan on over her camisole. Loki, also in pajamas, Downey, in Loki's spare pajamas, and Thor, wearing nothing but one sock and a pair of briefs, waited in the van with Steve.
It took the women about half an hour before they returned, now fully dressed in t-shirts, jeans, sneakers, and sunglasses. Natasha had a McDonald's bag in one hand and a tray of drinks in the other, while Hayley was carrying several plastic shopping bags.
"We left without our wallets," Steve said, as they climbed back in. "How did you pay for all that?" He braced himself for Natasha to say they'd stolen it.
"I memorized Bob's MasterCard number when we stopped for gas the other day," Nat replied.
"You did what?" asked Downey.
"Eat your breakfast." Natasha handed him the food. "You paid for it."
In the bags Hayley was carrying were clean clothes for everybody, in pretty close to the right sizes – Steve knew he could probably thank Natasha for that, too. There was also another first aid kit, bottled water and sandwiches for the road, and a few other miscellaneous things. One of the latter was a brace, to give Steve's ankle some better support than the bandages they'd been using so far.
Steve managed not to actually whimper as Nat pushed the brace over his swollen foot, but he held on tight to the headrest on the van seat and he could feel sweat rolling down the side of his face. It was a long way from the worst pain he'd ever felt – nothing beat breaking a rib from whooping cough – but it was the worst he could remember feeling in years. Steve had spent some time in the hospital after crashing three helicarriers into the Potomac, and the doctors had expected him to need months of physical therapy. He'd been back on his feet by the end of the week. Now here he was, laid up for the foreseeable future with a sprained ankle.
"If you want to say ow, say ow," said Natasha. "Nobody is going to think any less of you."
"I'm fine," Steve grunted. "I'm just annoyed that I was stupid enough to get hurt in the first place."
He was annoyed about a couple of other things, too. He was still angry with himself for giving in to the temptation of the Q&A panel, starting the chain of events that had led to Hayley being here. He was definitely angry with Loki for getting them all into this situation, and angry that he couldn't have done anything to save anybody during the attack on the hotel. The thing he was angriest about, though, was… well, no, he wasn't exactly angry; about it. He was more confused, and deeply troubled by the implications, and potentially angry, if any of those implications bore out.
Why hadn't he tried to save Wendy?
It was true that Steve's injury would have kept him from running, and he already knew he couldn't fight the Chi'Tauri hand-to-hand in this universe even when he was perfectly fit… but that skinny boy from Brooklyn who'd been so desperate to join the army, he would have done it. He would have known he would fail, that he would probably be killed and Wendy with him, but he would have done it anyway, for the same reason he'd once jumped on a grenade – because it was the right thing to do.
What had changed? Could it be that after several years in which courage was easy because Steve knew he was more or less indestructible, he'd forgotten how to be brave? Could he really have decided to just leave that girl to die, because saving her would have hurt?
"There we go!" said Natasha. "Nice and snug."
Steve realized he'd tensed his shoulders and gritted his teeth, and made a conscious effort to relax both. Nice and snug was an understatement. He felt like his toes were about to turn purple from lack of circulation.
"Thor," said Natasha, "you're next. Let's have a look at your back."
Thor pulled off the t-shirt he'd only just put on, and turned to the side so Nat could see. His injuries weren't deep but they were covered in scabs, and Steve knew from experience that shallow scrapes to the skin, where all the nerve endings were, could be far more painful than they had any right to be. Nat tore open a package of alcohol wipes, and started swabbing.
Steve had managed to keep quiet as Natasha put the brace on him, but Thor did make a soft hissing sound as she touched him. "I am unused to such pain from so small a hurt," he confessed. "I wonder if this is why mortals do not live long. Any injury causes them such stress that their lives are cut short."
Loki was watching with what appeared to be grudging admiration. "You bear it better than I expected," he murmured, low enough that Steve suspected nobody but Thor had been meant to hear it.
"It is unseemly for a warrior to complain," Thor said. "I shall have to take better care, though. Little as I like to flee from battle, I did promise Elsa that I would return her husband to her fit and well."
Maybe that was it, Steve thought. Maybe the reason he hadn't gone to save Wendy was because he knew this wasn't his body. Evans was probably going to be upset enough about the sprained ankle and the criminal record. Steve couldn't get him killed on top of everything else. That seemed like a pretty compelling argument, and yet it hadn't been what was on Steve's mind as he'd watched the alien drag Wendy into the hotel room. What he'd been thinking then was that he couldn't save her. If he tried, he would lose. That was true, but it was most definitely not the point.
Along with the rest of their purchases, Natasha and Hayley had bought a copy of that day's Calgary Sun, a newspaper that looked to be on about the same level of journalism as New York's Daily Bugle. The events at the convention had made the front page, with a blurry photograph of the fight and the headline Out of Control. Below that was a quote from one of the convention organizers: this is why the Marvel universe has Accords.
The actual article began on page two and everything it said made Steve winced in guilt. People were speculating that it was a terrorist attack – the rest of the convention had been cancelled and all the guests sent home for their own safety. Half a dozen other events that were supposed to use the damaged space had to be rescheduled or moved. Repairing the damage was going to cost millions and several people who'd been injured were already threatening lawsuits.
A few pages further in was an article about the events in the hotel. Nobody seemed sure what had happened there, either. Steve was relieved to see a note that a young woman had been found alive in the bathroom of the royal suite, but again there'd been extensive damage and many, many injuries. Reading it made him feel so powerless. As Loki had said, they couldn't do anything but run away.
Once they were all dressed, patched up as best they could be under the circumstances, and had eaten, they got back on the road. Within half an hour they were out of the city, heading south through rolling fields of yellow canola, or green pasture with cows and horses grazing. Downey needed a nap, so Hayley took over driving. Thor and Loki were in the back set of seats, Loki glaring out the window at the world going by and Thor sitting awkwardly sideways so his scraped back wouldn't rest against the seat. That left Steve and Nat in the middle set of seats, with the newspaper lying in between them. Steve tried not to keep looking at it, but he couldn't help it, and every time he did, he had to shut his eyes to make himself stop. There'd been nothing he could do.
"They're right, you know," said Natasha. "That's why the Accords exist."
Steve opened his eyes again and turned his head to look at her. "Really?" he asked. "You want to talk about that now?"
"Not really," said Natasha, "but there it is."
"If we hadn't been there, they would have taken Loki and none of us would stand a chance of getting home," Steve pointed out.
"I know," said Nat. "Innocent people still got hurt, and they didn't need to. We're not very subtle, Rogers."
Downey lifted the newspaper he'd been using as a sun shade. "You guys wanna hear something funny?" he asked.
"Nothing about this is funny!" Steve protested.
"I want to hear it," said Nat.
"Chris was totally Team Iron Man," said Downey. "We can probably find you the interviews on YouTube. He said if there were real Avengers, he would want them to have oversight rather than just letting a group of vigilantes answer to nobody but themselves." He chuckled – apparently he really did find it funny. "Nerdist dot com called him a traitor!"
It took Steve a moment to remember that Chris was Chris Evans, the actor who played him in those movies and the man whose body he was currently borrowing. The one he'd sort of hoped would try to live up to the ideals of Captain America, even if he couldn't do so in the way Steve himself had. He agreed with Stark?
"What about you?" Steve asked. Maybe if the actor who played Captain America was really on Stark's side, the one who played Iron Man would be on Steve's.
"I always thought watching the fans freak out was way more fun than explicitly choosing a side in a fictional argument," said Downey. "I gotta say, though, the guy in the room in Civil War who was making sense was Rhodey. To think you always know what's best for the world is arrogant and dangerous. Somebody's gotta be able to step in and say yes or no."
"The problem is," Natasha said loudly, "that this is a philosophical argument, and the thing with philosophical arguments is that there's no one right answer."
"That's not what you were saying a minute ago," said Steve.
"That's exactly what I've been saying the whole time!" said Natasha. "The Accords aren't a perfect solution because there are no perfect solutions in an imperfect world, but they're an attempt, and since they exist we have to go either around or through them in order to get anything done."
"You know where that got us?" Steve asked. "That got us here."
"That was the great thing about the movie, actually," said Downey, "was that you could see both sides. Tony's got a point about regulation being needed, but Steve's also got one about how it can keep them from helping people who need help. And people can discuss it all they want because it's not getting in anybody's way in the real world… until now, of course," he added.
"Well, maybe now some people will change their minds," said Steve. He wondered… if Evans were, right now, in Steve's body and in the hands of the Chi'Tauri, how did that make him feel about the Sokovia Accords? Or was he even thinking about them? Would Steve ever get a chance to ask? Probably not, due to the nature of exactly how they'd passed between universes. But if he did ever meet Chris Evans, he would definitely have some questions for him.